Harry Crews

ONLY IN FLORIDA - Literary snapshot

October 27, 1996

Southern storyteller Harry Crews writes tough but tender tales, blending his warped humor with eccentric characters and bizarre plots. The University of Florida professor cranked out books in the 60s and 70s only to hit a dry spell. But in the 80s, the spell was broken, and Crews wrote All We Need of Hell. In the story, Duffy Deeter tries to keep his life and family together. Here he remembers his dead father, a pilot whose life was marred by mental illness, and struggles with the memories.

When Duffy left his mothers apartment at Golden House, a misting rain was falling, and it had cooled off. West of Gainesville, off toward the Gulf of Mexico, heat lightning flashed low on the horizon. As Duffy eased through the fog rising out of the steaming streets, his ears were full of the sound of his fathers voice and his eyes swarmed with banking, diving fighter planes. He had not wanted to go into his fathers room, his hangar, but he had and now the planes would not leave him alone, nor would the memory of his father. Duffy did not want to think about the old mans work because there was no help for any of that, no help for what happened to his father and what he became because of it. But what he wanted to do was beside the point. Duffy would think of him, just as he knew he would drive east on Eighth Avenue to Waldo Road and then north to the airport.

He stopped at a package store and bought a bottle of Wild Turkey, not because he much wanted it but because it was his fathers favorite whiskey. In the parking lot, with the mist still falling, he uncapped the bottle, raised it in a toast and said: Heres to you, old man. He pulled long and hard at the whiskey before lowering the bottle.